TOKYO, Oct 8 (Reuters) - Japan's Toyota Motor Corp, Nissan Motor Co and Honda Motor Co plan to slash production in China by roughly half, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday, as a territorial row between Asia's two largest economies cuts sales of Japanese cars in the world's biggest auto market.

Sales have plunged at Japanese car makers since violent protests and calls for boycotts of Japanese products broke out across China in mid-September over the Japanese government's purchase of a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea from their private owner.

Nissan will suspend the night shift at its passenger car factories in China and operate only during the day, the business daily said. Nissan has two passenger car factories in China, in Huadu and Zhengzhou, with two lines each. A Nissan spokesman declined to confirm the report.

But Japan is getting her Karma handed to them for refusing to acknowledge the atrocities their troops perpetrated on China and Korea in World War II.

The Sino_Japanese war lasted from 1937 until 1945 (When Truman ended it with the Atomic bomb), saw the infamous Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking.

During a six-week period beginning in mid-December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army murdered, raped and looted the citizens of the former Chinese capital on a scale that even the Nazis would be hard-pressed to match when they were let loose on Europe a few years later.

Although official records confirmed the death toll at Nanjing at between 250,000 and 300,000, various Japanese nationalists have continued to claim over the decades that the figure has either been widely exaggerated or fabricated for the purposes of propaganda. As recently as February of this year, the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, said he believed the massacre never happenedit would have been impossible, he reportedly said, to kill so many people in such a short timeframe.

As for outsiders to the conflict, referring to the events in Nanjing as a massacre is still commonly interpreted as Japan-bashing. Nanjing is a key foundation stone in the national identities of both China and Japan, and 75 years on it remains a tinderbox that could quite easily flare into a third Sino-Japanese war.

The Germans have owned up to the holocaust. The Japanese HAVE NOT. Even today, the Mayor of Tokyo refuses to acknowledge that it happened.

We are just seeing the consequence of this arrogance. How this will play out is anybody’s guess. It’s not pretty.

It's true - the war never really ended. Our "rehabilitation" of Japan into the region's dominant economic power didn't help much, but Asian resentment of Japan is hardly unique to China - everybody hates them.

November 26, 1998. Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi. "Both sides believe that squarely facing the past and correctly understanding history are the important foundation for further developing relations between Japan and China. The Japanese side observes the 1972 Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China and the August 15, 1995 Statement by former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama. The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious distress and damage that Japan caused to the Chinese people through its aggression against China during a certain period in the past and expressed deep remorse for this. The Chinese side hopes that the Japanese side will learn lessons from the history and adhere to the path of peace and development. Based on this, both sides will develop long-standing relations of friendship" (Japan-China Joint Declaration On Building a Partnership of Friendship and Cooperation for Peace and Development)

They have apologized repeatedly. The unfortunate reality is that Chinese hatred is so deep that anything short of a Jonestown-style national mass suicide will be considered insincere by the Chinese. Ultimately, Japan will need its own nuclear deterrent. If Chinese hatred cannot be appeased, it must be deterred.

10
posted on 10/08/2012 11:37:53 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

What Japan did in Northeast Asia is neither unique nor uniquely brutal. The massacre at Nanking was only the third large-scale massacre* in that city alone. If the Japanese hadn't attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, and merely consolidated their Northeast Asian holdings, historians around the world would today be describing that era as merely the latter stage of the unification of Japan. The reason nobody brings up China's much larger scale atrocities during its unification is simple - victory means never having to say you're sorry.

* I am only referring to the large-scale massacres. There were smaller-scale massacres that resulted from civil wars and battles fought between kingdoms before and after the formation of the unitary Chinese state 2000 years ago. The big ones occurred at the conclusion of the 15th Century Ming Emperor Yongle's usurpation of his nephew's throne and 19th Century Qing General Zeng Guoquan's (brother of the illustrious Zeng Guofan) military campaign against the Taiping rebels.

11
posted on 10/08/2012 11:42:45 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

During a six-week period beginning in mid-December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army murdered, raped and looted the citizens of the former Chinese capital on a scale that even the Nazis would be hard-pressed to match when they were let loose on Europe a few years later.

Ironically, it was a German businessman, John Rabe, a NSDAP member (therefore, by definition, a Nazi), who organized the Nanking Safety Zone to save Chinese civilians from the Japanese army. I suppose that puts Germany on China's good side to this day - not that it stops them from ripping off German know-how and IP...

Japanese cars have an excellent reputation for reliability in China. The problem is that cars are uniquely exposed - they are the one big ticket item routinely left on the street by their owners. In the current climate, owning a Japanese car is riskier than usual, not because everyone in the country is a vandal, but because it only takes one bloody-minded individual to inflict thousands of dollars worth of damage. It wouldn’t surprise me if Chinese government functionaries are steering clear of Japanese cars for reasons of political correctness.

13
posted on 10/08/2012 11:52:56 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

Ironically, it was a German businessman, John Rabe, a NSDAP member (therefore, by definition, a Nazi), who organized the Nanking Safety Zone to save Chinese civilians from the Japanese army. I suppose that puts Germany on China's good side to this day - not that it stops them from ripping off German know-how and IP...

Not really. The Chinese aren't unique in this, but they are whiners to the nth degree. The Jewish population was cut in half and probably 10x more Jewish civilians were deliberately massacred than the Chinese, but you'll never hear about Jews coming up with these hate-fests.

At Nanking, the Japanese were re-enacting their traditional treatment of cities (in Japan itself) that resisted and inflicted serious casualties on the besieging force. Germans did much the same at the conclusion of the siege of Tianjin (during the Boxer Rebellion):

Germany sent only a small contingent to the relief of the foreign legions in Peking, but Kaiser Wilhelm II sent his men with this command: "Bear yourselves as Huns of Attila. For a thousand years, let the Chinese tremble at the approach of a German." The German imperial troops obeyed, with so much rape, looting and murder of Chinese citizens that the American and (ironically, given the events of the next 45 years) Japanese troops had to turn their guns several times on the Germans and threaten to shoot them, to restore order.

Wilhelm and his army were motivated most immediately by the murder of the two German missionaries in Shandong Province. However, their larger motivation was that Germany had only unified in as a nation in 1871. The Germans felt that they had fallen behind European powers like the United Kingdom and France, and Germany wanted its own "place in the sun" - its own empire. Collectively, they were prepared to be utterly ruthless in pursuit of that goal.

The Battle of Tientsin would be the bloodiest of the Boxer Rebellion. In an unsettling preview of World War I, the foreign troops ran across open ground to attack the fortified Chinese positions and were simply mown down; the Chinese regulars on the city walls had Maxim guns, an early machine-gun, as well as cannon. Foreign casualties at Tientsin topped 750.

14
posted on 10/08/2012 12:10:27 PM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

For what they did at Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, Bataan, Wake Island and the other Islands is unforgivable and the “bombing” should have been done to at least 6 more cities. God bless Harry Truman and the guys that made it happen.

Wilhelm and his army were motivated most immediately by the murder of the two German missionaries in Shandong Province. However, their larger motivation was that Germany had only unified in as a nation in 1871. The Germans felt that they had fallen behind European powers like the United Kingdom and France, and Germany wanted its own "place in the sun" - its own empire. Collectively, they were prepared to be utterly ruthless in pursuit of that goal.

The other powers in Europe were always nervous when they observed the various German states beginning to team up or coalesce.

The non-German powers had various geopolitical tools at their disposal to keep the German states at one another's throats, thus minimizing the danger to the other nations. Among these tools, IMHO, was the promotion of the conflict arising from the split of German states along Protestant and Roman Catholic lines, culminating in the 30 Years' War. Its end was not seen until the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, by which time the various German states and their peoples had been severely reduced from the war and its consequences.

Prussia was, of course, the Big Dog in the unification process. It slowly extended its consolidation to the east and the west in a patchwork manner across the north German duchies and across northern Poland and to the baltic states as well.

Prussia made the final push to unification under Bismarck and Wilhelm I with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. During the subsequent occupation of France, Wilhelm I was crowned Emperor of the second Reich at Versailles. (The first Reich was considered to be that of Otto I, in the tenth century; and we all know about the putative third one.)

The above is not to say that the new Emperor and his statesman wanted to consolidate France; far from it. But their tour de force had been both a standard for certain remaining non-Prussian states to rally around, and also a reminder that Prussia was now in the political, military, and (to a dgree) economic driver's seat, and the remaining German states were well to consider joining the Reich rather than fighting it.

The only state of the German world that didn't join in the unification was Habsburg Austria. Bismarck noted with a certain contempt the tenuous political stability of that decrepit hodgepodge of an empire, and decided he wanted nothing to do with it (subsequent to a brief war with them over certain political issues, that is).

The other nations grew alarmed at the recreation of the German Empire. But then Bismarck, that master of limited wars, passed from the scene, discarded by Wilhelm's grandson Wilhelm II. It took a couple of generations after German unification for all the conditions to be right for the War To End Civilization.

The Austrian possessions in the Balkans were the tinder, an assassin's bomb was the spark, and German munitions were half of the explosives in that catastrophe.

Ive read that the most popular and sought after car in China is the GM Buick.

I saw a lot of Buicks over there. The car badges say "GM Shanghai", already acknowledging GM's future world headquarters location. :) There are also a lot of Hyundai and Volkswagen models - more of those than Japanese makes.

But the most sought-after car is the Audi A6L - in black, of course. It's kind of an official staff car for CCP bureaucrats and everybody else wants one to look like a serious player.

Actually, no, they haven’t apologized. My sister-in-law is a Japanese language professor and right now based in Tokyo and tells me that they have apologized but not in the right nuance. From what I understand, Japanese has a number of subtleties and the apologies so far are not “mea culpa”

24
posted on 10/09/2012 1:19:32 AM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

What Japan did in Northeast Asia is neither unique nor uniquely brutal.

It was -- this was massacre looking into the victims eyes.

the unification of Japan. the problem is that Nanking is not and never was Japanese. The Japanese are ethnically and linguistically different -- also, the horrors that they unleashed are horrors despite the comparable horrors of the Chinese civil war.

25
posted on 10/09/2012 1:21:32 AM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

Prussia was, of course, the Big Dog in the unification process. It slowly extended its consolidation to the east and the west in a patchwork manner across the north German duchies and across northern Poland and to the baltic states as well.

what is left out is Napoleon's hand in creating modern Germany

before Napoleon's invasion of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire it was made up of 300 different statelets.

After he reorganized it and expanded Prussia's territory there were 20 odd states and many made kingdoms (Bavaria for one).

26
posted on 10/09/2012 1:25:58 AM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

It slowly extended its consolidation to the east and the west in a patchwork manner across the north German duchies and across northern Poland and to the baltic states as well.

not completely

Prussia's origins lie in the invitation extended by the Polish Prince of Mazovia (the state in which Warsaw now lies) to the Teutonic knights in the 1200s.

This was to help him fight the pagan Prussians (a West Baltic people). The Teutons committed genocide and killed off all the West Baltic peoples (we now have only the east Baltics: the Lithuanians and Latvians)

Then they slowly turned on Poland itself

In 1389 the Duke of the Lithuanians: Jagiełło converted to Christianity and married the Princess of Poland (who was of French Angevin blood, but was the daughter of a king of Hungary!) and technically this should have ended the need for the Teutons

But the Teutons fought the poles and lithuanians and it took a coalition of Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians (Ukranians/Belarussians/Russians) and Tartars to defeat the knights at the battle of Grunwald in 1410 (called Tannenburg -- and that defeat remained in Germanic memory to such an extent that the first battle victory of the Germans against the Russians was called the Battle of Tannenburg (redux) even though it was miles away)

Anyway, the Teutonic knights were allowed to remain as a subservient state

Then, in the 1500s the Grand Master converted to Calvinism and asked the Polish king to let him secularised his state. The Polish King (rather stupidly imho) allowed him to do this -- the reason was probably because the Polish king was actually Swedish, of the Vasa family and the Grand Master was his nephew (and also a cousin of the family that ruled Brandenburg)

Prussia remained a part of the Polish Crown, but in the 1600s it joined with Brandenburg when the larger part of the House of Hoffenstein (can't remember the name) took over the smaller family branch

This allowed the Elector of Brandenburg to call himself King IN Prussia (since no ruler in the Holy Roman Empire was allowed to call himself King)

So, Prussia first arose in the East, then they moved further east by carving up the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth between 1773 and 1793 -- incidently, this removal of a buffer state between the Germanics and the Russians was imho the root root cause of World War I

Then, to the Prussians luck, Napoleon came and they allied with him to grab a large part of Germany. Then they turned on him and lost, but Napoleon, instead of dismantling the state of Prussia (which he could have) let them be - a big mistake for France

they then allied with the Russians and the English to defeat Napoleon and grabbed a large portion of territory thanks to the Treaty after this (read Adam Zamoyski's Rites of Peace)

27
posted on 10/09/2012 1:40:25 AM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

the roots of world war I lie in the events of the turn of the 1700s to the 1800s -- the destruction of the buffer state of Poland-Lithuania, the nationalism created by the French revolution (in the 1800s the French forced Britons, etc. to speak French, the english forced the welsh and cornish and the russians and germans did the same) and also the treaty after napoleon did not give Russia the gains against Turkey that they wanted -- this was heightened when the french and english fought against Russia in the Crimean war, preventing Russia from capturing constantinople

In 1914 the Russians were afraid that the english were arming the Turks -- with two battle ships and the germans were doing the same. This would have enabled Turkey to stand up to Russia and Russia had considered its divine mission from the fall of Constantinople, to be to crush Turkey and restore Constantinople to Christendom. The Russians believed they had a Holy Mission to unite Orthodoxy against both Islam and western Christianity.

28
posted on 10/09/2012 1:46:46 AM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

It was -- this was massacre looking into the victims eyes. the unification of Japan. the problem is that Nanking is not and never was Japanese. The Japanese are ethnically and linguistically different -- also, the horrors that they unleashed are horrors despite the comparable horrors of the Chinese civil war.

In its long history, China (and any number of other empires) has conquered and assimilated ethnicities with different cultures, languages and skin colors. East Turkistan, Tibet and Mongolia all speak a language very distinct from Chinese, and much closer to Japanese. Their lands comprise 50% of today's Chinese empire. The vast majority of today's "Han" Chinese population were barbarian peoples subjugated and assimilated over thousands of years. The founder of China - who cut the population of China in half during the unification process - was the leader of a barbarian kingdom. The bottom line is again that victory means never having to say you're sorry.

Before the unification of China, there was no China. After the unification of China, the perception is that there has always been a China. The reality is that while the land mass on which China rests has always existed, the political entity that is China and the ethnicities that reside within it are the product of armed conquest and forced assimilation enforced with occasional exemplary large scale massacres like every other empire. A Japanese victory would not have significantly changed the biological facts, but would probably have displaced, at minimum, the Chinese language, much as the first "Chinese" emperor proscribed the use of written languages that preceded his rule (much as Turkey has attempted to stamp out the Kurdish language).

29
posted on 10/09/2012 7:24:20 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

South-Asians (from the Indian continent), Central Asians and West Asians have no particular feelings about the Japanese.

From my casual research years ago, at the time of the war, anti-colonial South Asian elites were grateful to the Japanese for showing that the white man could not only be beaten, he could be dealt large-scale and humiliating defeats. The Japanese victories in the Orient marked the end of European empire in the region. If Europe had been willing to adopt the Mongol resort of the wholesale massacre of restive populations, they could have prevailed. They were not, so they packed up and left - sometimes after wasting large sums of money and significant numbers of men on measures that could not have subdued the subject populations, except at unacceptable cost to themselves. The Japanese would have succeeded, because they were not averse to employing the traditional methods used by the empire-builders of antiquity, including of Japan and China.

30
posted on 10/09/2012 7:43:24 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

East Turkistan, Tibet and Mongolia all speak a language very distinct from Chinese, and much closer to Japanese

Well, no. East Turkistan/Uighuristan speaks Turkic, which can be related to Mongol, but in Tibet the Tibetan language is part of the larger Sino-Tibetan-Burmese language

Japanese is a language isolate, supposedly in the Altaic family related to Nenki etc. in Siberia but not proven.

Also, the statement of the unification of China is wrong -- the Older Zhou dynasty or the Song dates to 2000 BC and that is the origin. The other peoples got assimilated, the latest being the Manchu/Jurchen

But the unification of China didn't occur - this was reunification

31
posted on 10/09/2012 7:43:52 AM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

in Tibet the Tibetan language is part of the larger Sino-Tibetan-Burmese language

The Sino-Tibetan-Burmese classification is a sop to the Chinese, who obviously claim Tibet as part of the Chinese patrimony, and believe Burma really ought to join its ethnic kin in Yunnan as a Chinese province. German and Dutch are close enough for a novice to consider them similar languages. There is no way anyone can mistake any variant of Mandarin for any variant of Tibetan or Burmese. Besides, Chinese itself is a mish mash of languages carried over from the conquered kingdoms of antiquity. Written Chinese is a lot like Latin - the lingua franca among the literati, but the natives speak their own languages carried over from thousands of years ago. This is why someone from Hong Kong cannot communicate on the street with someone from Beijing without resorting to pen and paper - the former speaks Cantonese, the original language of the Han, whereas the latter speaks Mandarin, the original language of the barbarians who conquered them.

32
posted on 10/09/2012 8:02:18 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

Also, the statement of the unification of China is wrong -- the Older Zhou dynasty or the Song dates to 2000 BC and that is the origin. The other peoples got assimilated, the latest being the Manchu/Jurchen

The Zhou claimed neighboring states as tributary kingdoms, but never exercised political control. Besides, whatever date you prefer, Chinese political authority has always been established and maintained at the point of sword, just like anywhere else, by subjugating foreign tribes on its borders and carrying out exemplary massacres when that authority is threatened. And cities that resist its armies and cause significant casualties have traditionally been considered threats, given that the political authority's very existence depends on the maintenance of its coercive powers.

33
posted on 10/09/2012 8:14:09 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

If Europe had been willing to adopt the Mongol resort of the wholesale massacre of restive populations, they could have prevailed

The Dutch were willing to do that, the French to a lesser extent, but the British with Victorian morals weren't...

And I think you're mixing up South Asians with South-East Asians

Some Indian politicians (Subhash Chandra Bose) was enamoured by the Japanese, but he didn't command a large following and when he tried to set up his Azad Hind army, he got very few folks from the regular Royal Indian Army. He mostly got people from the Japanese prisoners of war (and also note that the majority of Indian POWs under the Japanese refused to become turncoats)

Among S-E Asians (except the Filipinos) there was the sense of Japan as a liberator, but then the French and Dutch were pretty cruel in their colonies, unlike the British. These feelings soon changed when they realized that the Japs were worse than their former colonial masters...

34
posted on 10/09/2012 11:56:44 PM PDT
by Cronos
(**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)

The Dutch were willing to do that, the French to a lesser extent, but the British with Victorian morals weren't...

Mongol (as well as traditional Chinese) tactics were involved killing cities that resisted their attacks to the last man, woman and child. Villages that harbored insurgents were simply wiped out. I don't think any European or Japanese army has ever gone that far. For instance, the Nanking massacre* wasn't a root-and-branch massacre - it was a random thing probably triggered by combat fatigue, due to the Japanese policy of keeping soldiers in battle until they were killed or maimed**. And there were plenty of Chinese survivors. Just two months earlier, the Battle of Shanghai killed 70,000 Japanese troops, over 10x the number of Japanese dead in the Battle of Nanking, but nothing remotely similar happened in Shanghai, so it's obvious that Nanking wasn't part of some broader Japanese pattern of city-wide massacres.

* Jonathan Spence writes "there is no obvious explanation for this grim event, nor can one be found. The Japanese soldiers, who had expected easy victory, instead had been fighting hard for months and had taken infinitely higher casualties than anticipated. They were bored, angry, frustrated, tired. The Chinese women were undefended, their menfolk powerless or absent. The war, still undeclared, had no clear-cut goal or purpose. Perhaps all Chinese, regardless of sex or age, seemed marked out as victims."

** This had serious consequences for Japanese battle skills, as all the veterans were killed off without necessarily having had the opportunity to impart their knowledge to the green troops coming in. Near the end of the war, Japanese battle losses were lopsidedly large.

37
posted on 10/10/2012 4:04:05 PM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

I think many of the massacres might have similar causes - part battle fatigue and part exemplary* to deter rebellion. By the time of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese forces had been fighting in China for 8 years. The invasion of Southeast Asia was assigned to battle-tested (or battle-fatigued) units that had been fighting in China for years, since they were facing large formations of white troops in battle for the first time since the humiliating Japanese defeat by Soviet forces at Nomonhan in 1939.

* After the Communist victory in 1949, the party is said to have killed millions - along with large numbers killed during the civil war itself - of property owners that it feared might become the locus of counter-revolutionary activity. I'd say these were qualitatively no different, and quantitatively far more numerous than the massacres inflicted upon China by Japan. Of course, the difference here is this - within non-Western countries, history is written by the winners. So you'll hear neither mention of nor emphasis on Communist-perpetrated massacres, and a monomaniacal focus on irredeemably wicked foreigners motivated only by a desire for random slaughter and black-hearted prejudice against the Chinese people.

In reality, of course, if the Japanese had prevailed in China, Japanese (or formerly Chinese) schoolchildren there would now be learning about the Japanese massacres as part of the breakage of china that occurs during any kind of national unification process (in this case of Mainland Japan aka the country formerly known as China). People who try to equate Nazi Germany with Imperial Japan, or paint Japan as being worse than Nazi Germany are sorely mistaken. Nazi Germany engaged in similar mass slaughters (but unlike the Japanese, with zero armed provocation) and provided no outs for the targeted groups. If you were a Jew or a Slav, there was no change in your behavior that could save you from extermination. The Japanese merely required of their conquered subjects that they did not rebel. Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, who worked during the occupation as a low level paper pusher for the Japanese bureaucracy, said of them that they were tough, but fair.

40
posted on 10/11/2012 8:20:55 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

Mandarin and Cantonese are both Sinitic languages, arent they? So wouldnt both their speakers be of Han origin?

Prior to the unification of China 2000-odd years ago, the Han kingdom was one of many states located in mainland Northeast Asia. The success of the Han dynasty led to the Chinese tradition of calling anyone who assimilated into the unified Chinese state a Han person. The map below shows the boundaries of some of the kingdoms prior to the unification of China. The Han kingdom is in lavender:

41
posted on 10/11/2012 8:46:10 AM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)

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